Investing in Grand Cru

Following my previous posts on why I decided to make any given investment, I thought I’d share briefly why I decided to make an investment into the gaming space – an area where many investors fear to tread. The first game from Grand Cru, Supernauts, has been in further development for 1 year since we invested. Without the product in the market, this post was largely meaningless. (You can grab the Supernauts game here and give it a whirl. Just be warned, you might get addicted and end up spending your entire pay check on gems: http://www.appstore.com/supernauts)

People: The team at Grand Cru has enough successes behind them to warrant an investment on their own: Markus Pasula (ex Mr Goodliving) and Mikko Wilkman (ex Habbo Hotel) are two of the co-founders behind the company (and the ones I interacted with the most during the investment process). We had zero scalability issues at launch (some secrets here)- testament to Mikko’s work behind the scenes for Supernauts. We had great featuring from Apple – testament to Markus’ (and the Marketing team’s) ability to engage with great partners.

Product: When I saw the Supernauts demo, my mouth fell open. Literally. It was easy to see how it could be a hit game – tried and testing building mechanic, coupled with cool space characters and a very user friendly, mass market game play.

Potential: Games either take off like a rocket, or do a belly flop. Time will tell what happens to the Supernauts, but with 1M downloads in the first 6 days, it looks like they may be taking off…

This is a case where, despite having a great first product to go to market with, I had to take a bet on the team. Grand Cru is a games studio, not a product. They are in the game making business, and I have to trust that the water in Helsinki will continue to produce the types of games that millions of people want to play, and pay for. Supernauts is only the first in a string of titles the Company plans on producing…

Finally, I think a big congratulations to the entire Grand Cru team is in order (not just the two co-founders I single out here) – there has been an incredible effort to bring Supernauts to market. <– Happy Cru

The users are absolutely fed up with Grand Cru’s lack of communication and respect. There has been no communication, not even a lazy facebook post when the servers are down for 12+ hours.
Grand Cru has abandoned its users, so don’t be surprised when all the top (paying) users abandon Grad Cru.